Photography, Social Media, and DIY!

The Problem with Social Analytics

For those of you that don’t know me, my first career, and my undergraduate degree, were in engineering. One of the first things that I learned as an engineer is that it takes metrics and analytics to run a process. Over the years I’ve transitioned from engineering, to operations and now into social media. And as I’ve designed social media operations teams and structures, I’ve continually become more annoyed with the fact that there aren’t better systems available for analytics and live tracking of tickets. It’s impossible to cleanly manage an operational team when you can’t clearly see what is going on.

There are dozens of analytics platform providers out there, but every one of them tends to miss something vital when it comes to reporting. For example, our current provider can’t tell me how many tweets, or Facebook posts occur per ticket. Since all tweets and posts are done through the tool, this seems like a huge miss. In my previous manufacturing role for Owens Corning I managed the implementation of ApenTech for our plant. This system allowed me to see every single thermocouple temperature, chemistry mixture, machine speed or quality test for the entire plant. It had a beautiful layout with clickable drill down points that allowed me to either get a high level view of how everything was going, or look closely at an individual section of the plant. My question has been, why can’t we do this for social? There are metrics in over-abundance for social media. Why can’t we get this organized in a way that allows operational teams to quickly get a pulse on what is happening with their support groups? Every time a platform demonstrates their analytics package to me, I end up seeing this incredibly pretty but altogether useless bubble chart. And if it’s not a bubble chart it’s something else equally useless for operational management. How do I justify more headcount, or a change in operations based on the chat below. What does that even tell me?

So here’s my conundrum: If you’re building out an operational platform that has hundreds of analytic points available, why wouldn’t you use them? If someone could create a live process map to display and track social operations like the one below, enterprise level companies would literally throw money at them. Each node would allow you to click in and get more detail as to what is happening. You’d have filters to set your time constraints, or filter by team. And most importantly, you’d be able to see the whole life cycle of social support in a single view. My only real question is, why hasn’t someone done this yet?